Nicki Fenty Corporation manufactures a variety of beauty products in several departments and evaluates departments and departmental managers by comparing actual cost and output relative to the budget. Departmental managers help create the budgets and usually provide information about input quantities for materials, labor, and overhead costs.

Chante Moore is the manager of the department that produces lip gloss. Chante has estimated these inputs for Lip gloss:

Input	Budget quantity per unit output
Direct Materials	8 Pounds
Direct Manufacturing Labour	30 Minutes
Machine Time	24 Minutes

The department produces about 100 units of lip gloss each day. Chantes department always gets excellent evaluations, sometimes exceeding budgeted production quantities. For each 100 units of lip gloss produced, the company uses, on average, about 48 hours of direct manufacturing labor (eight people working 6 hours each), 790 pounds of material, and 39.5 machine-hours.

Top management of Nicki Fenty Corporation has decided to implement budget standards that will challenge the workers in each department, and it has asked Chante to design more challenging input standards for the production of lip gloss. Chante provides top management with the following input quantities:

nput	Budget quantity per unit output
Direct Materials	7.9 Pounds
Direct Manufacturing Labour	29 Minutes
Machine Time	23.6 Minutes

3. Discuss the following:

a. Are these budget standards challenging for the department that produces lip gloss? (Use the numbers provided to support your argument) (2 marks)

b. Why do you suppose Chante picked these particular standards? (Critical thinking) (2 marks)

c. What steps can Nicki Fenty Corporations top management take to ensure Chantes standards really meet the goals of the firm? Discuss this briefly, with reference to the current scenario as well as to other approaches to budget preparation. (3 marks)